Multilitteratus Incognitus

I was catching up on my news comedy yesterday and I was delighted to see this as the subject of last week's "last week tonight"

Well, semester is almost over!  I think that I only have about 10 more days left in my 3rd EdD semester.  There must be a punchline joke here, but I am not finding it at the moment ;-)  Need some more sleep! That said, for the third assignment I decided to tackle a topic that I was fairly familiar with - connectivism.  My buddy for this assignment and I worked together to put together this NPR-style interview introducing connectivism to the class, and to other people.  We had both read about connectivism before, and had a variety of articles cross our desks over the past few years, both the in the EdD program, but also through various cMOOCs I had taken.  It was just a matter of collecting the info and determining the appropriate presentation. We both wanted to get some sort of OER out of this, so if people wanted to use the product they could.  That said, we did try other types of OER makers, the free type that allow you to create self-paced eLea...

An interesting documentary shared by one of my EdD classmates.

The other day I caught a post by Lenandlar on the #Rhizo14 MOOC which is over, but we amazingly are keeping it going.  At the end of his post on motivation that I wanted to address, since they've been on my mind and they've come up a few times in the past week. Are MOOC participants in favor of shorter or longer videos or it doesn’t matter?   I can't speak for all MOOC participants, I can only speak for myself, and from my own experiences. I can say that video length  does matter, but it's not just about the video length.  On average, I would say that you don't need a video that is longer than 20 minutes. My feeling is that if I want to watch a documentary, I will watch a documentary, not participate in a MOOC. Anything longer than 20 minutes is probably unfocused and not suitable to the medium and the goals of the course. Of course, simply having 20 minutes to work with doesn't mean that you should take up all that time.  This goes back to figuring ou...

I wish I could find a caricature of a personification of a MOOC as a super hero. It would fit really well in this post :)  I was recently reading a news item on the washington post titled  The Tuition is Too Damn High, Part IX: Will MOOCs save us? I have to say that it's amazing to me that Khan Academy is still included in the MOOC category even though Khan Academy isn't really about MOOCs.  That said, who knows, maybe in the future Khan Academy might turn into a MOOC-shop in the future (if they see money in it). Anyway, the point of this post is really about the flipped classroom model, and not about MOOCs.  Sure, the Washington Post talks about MOOCs as a potential savior for Universities and Student's wallets but what the article really is talking about is using MOOC content as a way to flip the face to face classroom; and this has nothing to do with MOOCs. It seems to me that if we didn't have money, time, energy, and/or the will to create resources for our f...

I came across this pretty interesting TED talk on the loss of wisdom, hidden knowledge and skills, the reductionism in what we do. It's a must-see :)

Finally catching up with gamesmooc this week ;-) I haven't quite gotten to playing games just yet (runescape is not cooperating with me), but I did read over the text-based materials (thanks to Pocket!) and views the TED talks.  This particular one was pretty interesting.  The example she gives of Herodotus of the Lydians playing games one day and eating another, thus surviving an 18 year famine by eating on alternative days is quite a nice example of flow . It also ties in nicely with a story I read today of " Death by Diablo " where a teen died, presumably after playing Diablo for 40 hours without break for food or sleep.  Maybe he had an underlying condition that precipitated his death - but it seems like even in a state of flow you can't ignore basic needs (water, food, sleep, bathroom breaks) for very long. Another interesting thing, a tie-in to learning theory, is a comment she makes about World of Warcraft  and quests, where even the lower level players ar...

This is keynote address from Games for Change. Pretty interesting! Big "G" Games.

My video introduction to the research methods course (for instructional designers) that I am teaching this semester came in.  Yay!  Even though I think I could have benefited from some make-up, the video came out pretty good.  (if the embedded player isn't working, here is the direct link to the video introduction )

I saw this the other day and it was hilarious! Yes, it's the onion (so don't take it seriously!) but there is a smidgeon of truth in the story (if you know what you are looking for) which makes it really really funny :-) In The Know: Are Tests Biased Against Students Who Don't Give A Shit?

I spent last week viewing and commenting on CCK11 blog post, but not really writing much about it. I saw a number of posts on digital scholarship, but I still haven't had a chance to listen to the MP3 file. Hopefully today on the commute home! The speaker has a really soft voice and it's hard to really hear him on the train (perhaps some audio post-processing is in order?) This week in CCK11 we've got learning theories. luckily most of this stuff is a great review for me since we covered most of these theories quite a lot throughout the applied linguistics curriculum. We didn't much with connectivism though (which is why I am attending CCK11) since that was near the end of the semester. In any case, there is a a nice ten minute video on YouTube that goes over the various major theories of education. If you haven't heard of educational theories, this is quite a good back-of-the-napkin figure to get you started. If you're in instructional design and you haven...

Here's an interesting TED video on the World's English Mania. You know, I am not sure I completely agree. I think that there is a need for a worldwide lingua franca, but I don't necessarily agree with Jay that English or other "major" languages for that matter, are not eroding regional and other national languages. I guess this is a topic for a much wider discussion. What do you think?

I like common craft videos and I was a little disappointed that I had not seen a new one for a while. Well, the good folks over at common craft have created a video for cloud computing. I think that I sense a change in direction here for these videos - previous videos seemed to be more for the layperson-enduser, however this particular video seems to be targeted toward the layperson-manager. Interesting, but not as entertaining as the other ones :-)

Now you've probably seen this already, but in case you have not here's another great commonCraft video.

This is simply a great video to watch on the hows and the whys to the current credit crisis. The visuals, the setup, and the explanations are great in my opinion. Have a look - it's only 11 minutes. I would say that this is a good intro video for intro to finance classes. The Crisis of Credit Visualized from Jonathan Jarvis on Vimeo .

Here's and interesting (short) animated documentary on the history of the internet. For most geeks among us this is common knowledge, but it's a good video to get those among us who don't know much about the origins of the internet up to speed :-) I think this would have been useful as an instructional video at the beginning of our class on business networking (a class for MBA student to understand the IT back end of computer networking. It can be used both as an icebreaker and an introduction to the history and concepts before getting into the nitty-gritty of networks and network management.